You LEFT your wife and twenty-one kids on the verge of starvation with only a jelly roll

LEFT! LEFT! LEFT,RIGHT, LEFT!

-- Traditional Army cadence call

Because the heart sends blood through the veins and the lungs pull air to the irresistible impulse of the autonomic nervous system, it follows that the human foot strikes the surface it walks on, and the human voice rises, in rhythmic response to that striking. Early men must have realized that grunting, chanting, and, later, singing together helped them to walk long distances or perform repetitious tasks.

As civilizations became more complex, so did their expansionist efforts, including making war and taking prisoners. Better performance, it was discovered, could be obtained from both soldiers and slaves if they, too, were made to do their duties to the sound of instruments or songs. (Remember the drummer beating time for the rowers aboard the war galley in “Ben-Hur,” and the field hands wearily shambling through Atlanta to “Let My People Go” in “Gone With the Wind.” Now recall the soldiers calling cadence in the movie “Taps.”)

Contemporary soldiers, sailors, and air force personnel still sing; however, nowadays the pace-keeping chant that most people associate with military maneuvers is “calling cadence.” But when did “Hi! Hi! Hee!” become “One! Two! Three!”? Happily, almost the exact moment of this “momentum-US” event has been recorded.

One evening in 1944 at Fort Slocum, New York, a troop of tired soldiers was resting in camp after a day of tedious exercises. The sergeant in charge was thus surprised to hear one of his men singing, or rather chanting, a catchy sequence of words and numbers that ran like this:

The author was one Willie Duckworth, a black soldier who had been thinking about a way to make marching more lively and interesting. The command portion of his call, he explained, was to be shouted by the leader, while the counting section was the response to be returned by the men.

The sergeant at once realized the value of this “Duckworth Chant,“ which was eventually named “cadence,” from the Latin catena, for chain. The Duckworth is still used today, with variations, by all branches of the service. It may lead into a song such as the merry satire of “Old King Cole,“ or the macabre saga of “A Yellow Bird,” but no matter what follows it, a cadence call really does get the “ducks” in a row.

Through the ages, then, workers and warriors, whether voluntary or conscripted, have had the burden of their efforts eased by music, as well as the pain of overtaxed bodies -- and hearts. Perhaps most importantly, they have been bonded and bound together into a corps of solidarity with a solid core of will not only to strive but even to survive. Few forces bind closer than the chain that is the cadence. AM I RIGHT OR WRONG? (You’re RIGHT! ) CORRECT ME IF I’M WRONG! (You’re RIGHT! ) SOUND OFF -- and SOUND AGAIN!

Page 2 of 2 - Rose Wolf is the author of the columns Witch Ways and Robots and Butterflies. She can be seen at Angel's Landing and around the streets of Salem.